Orange center spending stops
Maxwell:
Continuing to pay for expansion was foolish, but county needs to kick its subsidy habit.
Imagine for a moment that your spouse lost his or her job — and kept going on shopping sprees every week.
So you sat your spouse down at the kitchen table and said:
Spouse, I love you, but we can’t afford for you to keep spending like this.
Your spouse grudgingly agreed. And you thought things were swell.
Except six weeks later, you found receipts that showed your spouse had kept spending money … around $5 million to be precise.
Well, then your spouse is probably Jerry Demings. Or Betsy Vander Ley. Or any of the other five members of the Orange County Commission.
Because, as the Sentinel revealed yesterday, Orange County continued to spend millions of dollars on a convention-center expansion plan it had previously said it was putting on hold.
Sentinel reporter Jason Garcia scoured public records and found evidence of checks continuing to be cut — $100,000 last week, $185,000 the week prior, $4.8 million the week before that and so forth.
Not only that, the county was raiding its reserve fund … during a recession … to expand a building that’s already 7-bloody-million square feet.
All of which raises an important question:
What is wrong with these peo-
Other communities focus on growing high-wage, high-tech jobs. We keep pouring billions of hotel-tax dollars into a money-losing building that’s already bigger than the Pentagon.
Seriously, what part of “global recession” don’t you understand?
Mayor Jerry Demings finally decided to turn off the spigot.
In an Aug. 27 memo to county commissioners, Demings said continuing to raid the reserves was “not sustainable, nor does it fit within our fiscally conservative historical approach to maintaining healthy reserves.”
I believe that’s the Keynesian economic theory of: No duh.
Now, county officials stress that they never promised to stop spending money altogether; that they would continue spending on design work, even if construction plans were on hold — and that everyone knew that.
But that’s not an excuse.
That’s just an incredibly awful plan.
It’s like saying: We’ve decided we can’t afford a house right now … so we’re going to hire an architect to design one.
(And by the way, pre-pandemic designs won’t work in a post-pandemic world — a point Demings also acknowledged in his memo.)
Here’s the real problem: This county is addicted to this behavior. We’re subsidy junkies.
We’ve been providing welfare for hotels and theme parks for so long that we’ve stopped asking ourselves whether it’s a smart idea.
Data and history suggest it is not. Despite decades of expanding the center, Orlando ranks dead last in median wages among Americas 50 largest metros.
It’s not hard to understand why. Most of the jobs bolstered by the convention and tourism industries are in hotels, restaurants and retail.
Other communities focus on growing high-wage, high-tech jobs. We keep pouring billions of hotel-tax dollars into a moneylosing building that’s already bigger than the Pentagon.
Newsflash: If you can’t make your convention center work with 7 million square feet, another million square feet isn’t going to be the secret sauce.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from experts on the industry.
Heywood Sanders, a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, has been studying convention centers and economic development for decades. He says the benefits of convention spending have long been overblown — and are only diminishing as society moves increasingly online and away from in-person meetings.
“If you want to spend a billion here or a billion there, don’t expect a return,” he said.
Sanders offers frank, datadriven analysis — something Orange County leaders have never sought in the 22 years I’ve been watching them.
Instead of seeking out hardnosed economic skeptics to challenge their spendthrift ways, the county has asked hoteliers and convention industry profiteers for advice.
What do you think are those people going to say?
To continue the addiction metaphor mentioned above, this would be like asking your local drug dealer whether you should kick your drug habit.
Orange County: You need help. You need to listen to someone else before plowing hundreds of millions more dollars into the same old thing.
Sanders told me this week he’d be happy to give you his perspective … if you’re willing to listen. (And Orange: You might as well listen. You’re already an entire chapter in his book: “Convention Center Follies.”)
If hoteliers still argue another expansion would help them make gobs of money, then let them fund it.
If there’s a hint of encouragement, Demings told the Sentinel’s Steve Hudak that he wanted to see if “there is some other major need where we can use funds …”
Yes there is, starting with transportation. Central Florida has a woefully underfunded bus system — one that many hospitality workers have to ride for an hour or more each day because there aren’t enough routes. We also have a SunRail system that’s hemorrhaging money.
Instead of asking local taxpayers to foot the bills, local leaders should push legislators to allow them to use hotel taxes on these much-needed things that will serve our community and decrease the tax burden for local residents.
Sure, it’s great — if ridiculously overdue — that Orange County has finally agreed to stop planning a center expansion it probably shouldn’t have planned in the first place.
But unless Orange County seeks help to truly kick its nasty subsidy habit, we’ll be having this same, tired discussion again in a few years.